If you’ve ever dreamed of playing a game where you’re a horse-racing sumo competing against a character in Street Fighter, you’re in luck. That’s not a joke either—such a surreal mash-up game really does exist, and two Japanese sporting associations are hoping it will get you, dear reader, into horse racing and sumo.
Japan Sumo Cup, a free web-based game, is the brainchild of the Japan Horse Racing Association and the Japan Sumo Association—two groups that consist mostly of old men upholding two ailing sporting traditions in Japan.
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To attract more youthful interest in their respective sports, the two associations have combined three disparate worlds to create a hybrid gaming environment that features everything from navy men with trumpets, a levitating sumo competition house, and sumos and street fighters, of course.
The game is pretty straightforward to play, but really hard to win. For round one, you select your preferred sumo wrestler from a list of three of the top sumo wrestlers in Japan, then you select a rival from three street fighter characters, Ryu, Blanka, and Dhalsim. Once the game gets started you basically win points by pressing the up and down arrow to select either a blue hand token or a green horse shoe token. Sadly, there’s no actual fighting involved, but gamers can sure spend time revelling in the absurd land captured in this game.
Throughout the game, you’re mostly too busy focusing on the tokens and thumping the up and down keys to soak in much of the scenery. However, towards the end of the game, you’ll see your opponent unleash some kind of magical power that propels him faster towards the finish line than you.
The author plays and loses against Dhalsim. Image: Screenshot from Japan Sumo Cup
I played against Dhalsim, who was actually riding an elephant, not a horse (as the commentator kept pointing out), and towards the end of the game he started levitating, shrouding both himself and his elephant steed in a curious orange hue.
In the next few days, the creators of the game are set to release some new sumo and Street Fighter characters, and right now the game is only in Japanese. But if you’re curious about what a game with Street Fighters, sumos, and horses looks like, look no further. But will it, ultimately, attract a hoard of millennials to the actual sports? Only time will tell.
Cool Japan is a column about the quirky and serious happenings in the Japanese scientific, technological and cultural realms. It covers the unknown, the mainstream, and the otherwise interesting developments in Japan.
